by Professor Francis Boyle

“What we’re seeing in Gaza now, is pretty much slow-motion genocide against the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza…. If you read the 1948 Genocide Convention, it clearly says that one instance of genocide is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a people in whole or in part,” stated Francis A. Boyle, professor of International Law at the University of Illinois in Champaign. “And that’s exactly what has been done to Gaza, since the imposition of the blockade by Israel; then the massacre of 1,400 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom were civilians, in Operation Cast Lead. And that also raises the element in the Genocide Convention, of murder, torture, and things of that nature.”

Boyle spoke to {EIR} on Jan. 15, 2010, giving his assessment of Gaza, one year after the Israeli attacks. He stressed that he was speaking only for himself.

While the Israelis stopped the artillery bombardment and air strikes just before the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, the deaths of Palestinians continue–from lack of medicines, infrastructure, clean water, and everything else that the world community–as shown in emergency aid to Haiti–{knows} is necessary to sustain human life.

But no international action has been taken to stop genocide in Gaza–despite the finding by the UN’s Goldstone Report that Israel committed war crimes in the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, and in the killing of civilians, and despite the Jan. 21, 2010 letter by more than 50 members of the U.S. Congress to President Obama that due to “the unabated suffering of Gazan civilians,” he must press to end the Israeli blockade.

Similarly, according to Turkish Prof. Bulent Aras, there is almost no hope for a peace agreement, or for ending the growing isolation of Israel from the international community, unless Gaza is opened and reconstruction begins. Aras was speaking on a Jan. 14 conference call, sponsored by the Turkish SETA and New America Foundations in Washington, D.C. He was addressing the recent tensions between Israel and Turkey after the Israeli Foreign Ministry insulted the Turkish ambassador, and on the collapse of the Turkish-mediated Israel/Syria negotiations, which ended with the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

According to Boyle, the question of the Gaza opening must be immediately taken up by the Obama Administration. “We need all the openings to Gaza, the crossings from Egypt and Israel, opened immediately. {Massive} provision of humanitarian assistance, medical supplies to Gaza–exactly what Obama’s doing today, with respect to Haiti–I support that! But why aren’t they doing it to Gaza? You have 1.5 million people over there.

“Unless this step is undertaken, certainly on Gaza, relieving the people of Gaza with massive humanitarian relief supplies, I really think we’re going to see a dog-and-pony show,” being run by the Obama White House, and the sending of Sen. George Mitchell to the region.

So far, what the U.S. has done is, “once again, provid[ed] diplomatic cover for Israel to stall and delay its objectives, and meanwhile, they continue to steal Palestinian lands, destroy their orchards, destroy their olive fields, and build more settlements. This has been going on, right from the beginning of the Middle East peace negotiations in 1991, when I was legal advisor to the Palestinians and the Syrians at that time.”

But, “miracles can always happen: Look at the darkest days of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and all of that collapsed,” said Boyle. “Well, here we have another apartheid regime, Israel. It’s apartheid to its core, it always has been. This whole situation could turn around and collapse very quickly–I just don’t know. But I’ll hang in there, certainly, with the Palestinians.”

And recent events in the field of international law lead Boyle to say that, as in the case of Chilean fascist Pinochet, law may catch up with Israeli criminals.

Read the rest at this link.

from AllGov

Israel’s military has reprimanded two senior officers for an artillery attack last January in the Gaza Strip that involved the use of white phosphorus, a chemical condemned by human rights groups.

from PressTV

An Israeli Knesset member says there is evidence showing that deceased Palestinians were stripped bare of their vital organs while in police custody in Tel Aviv.

Israeli politician and leader of the Arab nationalist party, Ahmad Tibi, said on Saturday that a medical institution in Israel harvested appendages from the bodies of dead Palestinians in the 1990′s.

According to Tibi, the body parts, which included heart arteries, bones, and corneal tissue, were used in organ transplants for Israeli soldiers.

Meanwhile, the Israeli television has shown a documentary in this regard, claiming that Israeli politician and Knesset member Aryeh Eldad was the main culprit behind the bodysnatching incident.

The organ theft issue was first brought to the fore in a report published earlier in August by Sweden’s largest circulation daily, Aftonbladet.

According to the report, Israeli soldiers were snatching and killing Palestinian men to harvest their organs for sale on the black market. It sheds light on the case of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, a 19-year-old Palestinian man, who was shot dead in 1992 by Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Imatin.

The report claimed that Ghanem’s body was then abducted and returned several days later by the Israeli military with a cut from the stomach to the neck that had been stitched up.

When asked what happened to the body, the soldiers told Bilal’s family that he had undergone an autopsy in Tel Aviv. The family, however, claims that his organs had been stolen.

After the incident, at least 20 Palestinian families told Bostrom that they suspected that the Israeli military had taken the organs of their sons after they had been killed by Israeli forces and their bodies were taken away.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry reacted with anger to the report, calling it “a grotesque libel to incite anti-Semitic sentiments.”

Their anger was widely believed to be due to the fact that it had made reference to the recent arrests in New Jersey of several prominent US Jews for a number of alleged crimes, including brokering the sale of organs for transplant.

In 2004, pathologist Yehuda Hiss was removed from his post as head of the state-run L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine after a Health Ministry investigation found that he had been involved for years in taking body parts, such as legs and ovaries, without family permission during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research and training.

This is while in July 2009, a New York Rabbi, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, was arrested after it became clear that he was the main broker for a major human organs trafficking ring.

According to Knesset Member Muhammad Baraka there are more than 600 dead Palestinians’ bodies buried in what Israel calls ‘the number graveyards’, which were created for freedom fighters Palestinians killed in combat with the Israeli army.

Baraka requested in August that Israel return the bodies to their families, but his demand is yet to be taken into account by Israeli authorities.